Senseless In The Arms of An Angel
by mor-tru
Summary: This story addresses the question of O'Neill's capture, internment and eventual escape from Iraq. Set during his Special Forces days. Warning: Descriptives of torture.


_**Senseless In The Arms Of An Angel**_

**mortru**

------oOo-----

_Iraq__1989..._

The Blackhawk sprang straight up from the desert floor. It banked a hard right and tilted precariously at a 60-degree angle into the turn. Through the open hatch, and just beyond the silhouette of the door-gunner, I could still see her standing alone and defiant in the sand.

She was Iraqi, and she had saved me.

-----oOo-----

_Somewhere northeast of Baghdad 4 months earlier..._

I woke up the first time on a rough concrete floor spitting out a mouthful of blood. One eye was glued shut and my wrists were wired together **_real_** tight - enough so that the hands had gone numb. Overhead was a bare light bulb. It hung down at the end of a skinny, twisted wire about a foot in length. Later I'd find out it was left on continuously.

The cell consisted of the usual dank, gray walls and nothing else besides the presence of several other shadowy, quivering lumps sharing the same grimy floor space. There were eight bodies moving in some capacity, one who wasn't. The one who wasn't lay on his side, his eyes half-open in a blank stare with a mixture of blood and spittle dribbling out one corner of his mouth. I guessed he was either already in a coma or close to it. After a while I figured out I wasn't a guest of the Baghdad Hilton but in one of the regime's infamous 'houses of questioning'. And I figured that one out primarily from the screams, which were far enough off to give some sense of size to the place, but otherwise way too close.

The only real memory prior to any of this was seeing Frank Cromwell scrambling aboard a Blackhawk. We were trying to make point when the mission suddenly went south courtesy of the local contingent of the Republican Guard. They basically swamped us. All hell broke loose, and what should've been a quick sprint to the exfil just disintegrated into this one massive fucking firefight. The bird was on its way – too late to turn back for them, or for us. Heard it in the distance, coming in low over the sand. Its nearness is what made the running easy. Everyone was just hauling their respective asses. RPGs popping off everywhere. Rounds kicking up the sand. The only savings was the dark. But even that was intermittent. Every time a grenade hit it lit us up like a strobe light flashing. Played havoc with the vision because the eyes had to keep readjusting to the sudden brightness.

That's when I heard the distinctive whistle of an incoming round behind me. So dove into the dirt and felt the heat of it wash over. Shook it off and scrambled back to my feet. Then another landed in the 'close zone' and knocked the bejeesuz right out of me. Went down hard again, head fuzzed, hearing gone, just engulfed in white noise. Didn't know for sure how long I was out of it, but do remember opening my eyes just in time to see the bird soar skyward through the haze. Last thought before blacking out totally was – _Oh shit!_ _I'm__fuck_ed - which as it turned out was true based on the present location and physical condition.

Don't remember much on how I got to the 'house of questioning '. Got dragged and kicked around a bit. Stripped down to skivvies at one point and tossed in the back of a truck. It was a cold ride punctuated with a blur of aggressive voices and pain from a succession of kicks and punches that ended with a rifle butt to the side of the head. Based on the vomiting, I guessed I was already concussed from the RPG round, so the second hit to the side of the head just nailed it – was out cold for however long it took to reach the cell's location.

--o--

Inside the cell, no one talked.

No one moved.

We just lay on the concrete, shivering from cold and fear. Everyone was bloodied in some way. Everyone had their hands tied. Most of the men kept to themselves. Two were brothers. Guessed this because I could hear them whispering, comforting each other. Not fluent in the language, but know enough to interpret their tone.

Just kept drifting in and out of consciousness. Came to at one point and realized that there were a couple of kids in there now - boys. Nine, maybe ten years old. One got hauled off after a while because boys get special treatment in these types of places. They get picked up for no other reason than to distract the purveyors of brutality. Strict adherence to Islamic Laws just doesn't happen in 'houses of questioning'. Rape of children is common. They can't fight back. So both boys know why they're here.

Children disappear by the thousands in this régime.

After the one boy was taken, the other is left petrified. I could hear his teeth chattering loudly. So I crawled over to him, got close to him. Couldn't actually hold him because my wrists were still wired, but tried to reach blindly for his hands with mine that had no feeling left in them. Just thought to lie next to him, offer him some comfort with my presence. It's all I had. Let him know, at least for that moment, that he wasn't in there alone. It was a gesture of compassion to a frightened child. A kid caught up in an environment that no kid should ever be in. So holding his hand at that moment wasn't going to matter a rat's ass to anyone else in there - except the boy.

Later he whispered that he didn't want to get raped. Know this because he said the same thing repeatedly. What else could he have been thinking? But there's nothing you can do to stop whatever's going to happen to him. It's obvious I can't help. But he hangs on anyway, snugs up against my back, arms around my chest, after he realizes what I'm offering – just simple closeness, not salvation. Hurts like hell, him clinging, squeezing, and trembling. After a while, dunno how long, I fell asleep or passed out, whatever, and when I woke up, the boy was gone and that's that, never saw him again. Never even felt him leave.

God damn them for that.

--o--

The beatings are simple. They hang you from a hook in the ceiling by a wire tied around your wrists. The first blows are always from behind, across the lower back, which effectively prevents you from kicking or using your legs in any way. The next couple of blows are higher, across the shoulders. Sometimes a scapula fractures, sometimes an arm gets broken. Either way, you're left hanging and helpless. The pain is shattering.

After that, they pick and choose their spots. One spot is the right knee. Couldn't feel much below it after the second blow. Another spot is the kidneys. Peed red for weeks. Another spot is low in the gut. Hanging and stretched there's no way to ward against the blows.

Most of the time there are four men, each bringing his own sadistic talent. One always stands behind, his presence a hot stench of breath on the back of the neck, threatening just by his closeness. One who only asks the questions and doesn't give a fuck about the answers. One who holds the electric cables, and grins in incessant anticipation of their use. Grins even more during their use. One who smokes, and enjoys the slow burning of human flesh knowing that the ugly round blossoms will weep pus for weeks afterwards - a constant reminder of his face.

They all have black thick mustaches, facsimiles of their mentors.

To make you talk, a favorite tactic is to wrap wire around your neck and tighten it. They do this while you're still hanging by your arms. This intensifies the pressure in your head until your vision goes dark. There's just a roaring in your ears that drowns out their voices until eventually you do black out. Then they release the wire, throw water at you to revive you, and do it again. You die and come back, die and come back. Three or four times in a row of that shit and your head feels like it's going to explode. And even if you **_can_** figure out what they wanted to hear, you can't say it anyway, because you're too hoarse.

Meanwhile the damage just piles up.

In between the clubbing, the shocks, the burns and the choking are the questions, which you ignore. There's no point to them.

_'Ismack eh?_' - 'what is your name'. If you answer, sometimes you don't get hit. But after a few questions you realize there's no way to figure out the why. It's whimsical, and the sheer horror of that - that you have absolutely no say in the matter, no control over the process, that this isn't a matter of finding out the truth in your story or your name - is almost overwhelming. Some men, at that point, lose themselves. They're the ones you can hear screaming over and over and over again long after they've been cut down and dragged back to the hole. They've lost the line between real and not real, they're stuck in a loop where the beatings go on and on, doesn't matter that it stopped long ago.

Big pain is a tornado. It scours the brain and when there's nothing left there it goes after the soul. It takes a man who believes he's different, who likes simple things - music, fishing and watching the stars - who loves and is loved in return, and it turns him into a mindless beaten slug with nothing to differentiate him from all the other mindless beaten slugs moaning around him in the half-dark. Even a strong, healthy, fit man is reduced to very little in a matter of days.

While this is going on you don't think about rescue or escape. You don't think about the team, or about your country. You don't think 'my name is Jack O'Neill, born in Minnesota, good ole US of A'. You don't **_ever_** think about that one person who keeps your heart safe. You just think about the next breath and the one after that and the one after that. Because the sole motivation **_has_** to be getting through the next minute. If you think about anything else, it diffuses your focus and you lose everything.

You learn about things like this in training. You even get some dry runs, which at the time feel pretty fucking realistic. But it's nothing compared to what it really is. Because the difference between training and the real shit is the difference between trying to teach the student and trying to kill him.

So you don't think. You can't. Because it's only in fiction that the heroes suffer horrendous tortures gracefully, and in between their torture sessions, they think about their lovers, philosophize, and plot elaborate and successful escapes.

In real life, the machine goes on 24 hours a day, so you stay in focus, don't lose yourself, and maybe you don't die.

--o--

In the beginning, there were several days of this kind of 'intense questioning'. I know this mainly because of the event/timeline reconstruction by SOCOM afterwards. When it was happening, I couldn't keep track of time. It could've been a month, or a week or a single really long day for all I knew. There was no pattern or routine, no regular mealtime, no sunlight, no outside sounds to mark the passage of time, just a daze of exhaustion and pain punctuated by terror and agony. The only prompt to the next session was the loud click of the door as it unlocked. Someone would get thrown in. Someone else would get dragged out. Sometimes it was me. Not that there was any thought of thank God it's 'not me' this time because if it wasn't, you'd still have to deal with the anticipation that the next time it would be, and somehow, that was a lot worse.

Don't know what day it was, don't know how many days had passed. Time was measured only by the traffic of busted bodies rotating through the door. For a while as many as fifteen were crowded around, later we'd thinned all the way to three. We never talked. No point to it. No strength anyway, and survival didn't depend on it. Woke up in a fever at some point and found I was completely alone for the first time. No real clue what happened to the waves of faceless others, can only surmise that in the blur they'd disappeared completely into the machine's black hole.

Maybe I was fitter at the onset, not used up physically like a lot of them were. Maybe I got off easy – if 'questioning' was easy - because I was more of a bargaining chip. Maybe killing me wasn't at the top of their to-do list because it seemed like the 'intense' part of the questioning dropped off; at least the frequency of it did. Maybe they wanted to make sure I didn't die. At least not yet.

But the endless stretch of time continued. The beatings and torture in some form continued. Breaks were random. Maybe it was as little as a few days, maybe as much as a week depending on the severity of the last session. Then they'd start all over again. I could never tell when the cycle slowed or if it ever really stopped. It was just one blur of pain to lesser pain to a healing ache slammed back to hard pain again. Maybe they'd rotate in a new crew and that was their initiation phase. Club the American. It wasn't as though I ever got a good look at the quartet in the questioning room. Sometimes it seemed like there were more, but maybe that had to do with my head.

But it was always the same. The door would click open, the wrists would get tied again and the new crew would drag me off and string me up - '_Ishmak eh?''_

Didn't matter what I'd answered before. Each session was unique. Eventually I just gave them the one thing they wanted to hear – 'O'Neill, Captain, 0985647384'.

No more smart-ass replies.

--o--

Then one day, one night, who the hell knows, dumped back in my cell, curled up in a tight ball after a hard day of questioning, I hear a grenade hit the compound. Don't know whose it was. Theirs. Ours. Just know the jolt made the building rock. The hurts hurt more. But the sound of it was promising. Can't say why. It was just familiar and had some expectation. Struggled to my feet, back against the wall – waiting. Could hear shouting outside the cell door. Several voices screaming. Other men yelling. Just a general morass of noise.

Suddenly the door to the cell opened – urgently - followed by the distinct sound of a clip being slapped into the stock of an AK. Not good. Change in tactics. Know something's going down. Thought – _fuckit _- and gathered what strength there was left and charged the doorway. Got maybe a foot from it when the barrel end of the AK got jammed in my gut. Going down saw another pair of boots and felt the connect of a knee against the side of my head and jaw. Lost a couple more teeth and hit the floor with a mouth full of blood. Out cold.

Came to in the back of a covered truck. Surprised at being alive. Couldn't figure out why they hadn't just double-tapped me back in the cell. Figured maybe we were in for more questioning at one of the neighbors houses. Who knows. Peered around in the semi-dark and took in about twenty other huddled and semi-broken bodies. All of them more or less alive and bound. Most already dead inside. Could see it in their vacant stares. They were already carcasses.

I wanted to roll out, but my legs wouldn't move. The bad knee felt like jello inside. The arms, wired again, were completely numb. The hit to the gut and the kicks that followed cracked a couple ribs because I could feel them moving around. Breathing was tough.

After a while, the truck stopped. It was sunset. Beautiful. Red. Orange. Gold. A sky set on fire. First I'd seen in a long, long time. Thought - _west is home, where those colors are_. Don't know why I thought about that considering the situation. But after so long in the dark, those colors were almost painful to look at. Maybe it was a flicker of buried hope, or maybe a flicker of resolute despair sneaking in. Dunno for sure.

Then everyone got hauled out and dragged a few feet to a pit where the guards casually started shooting on semiauto. Short bursts - bap-bap-bap here, bap-bap-bap there.

Tried desperately to stand, to put up one last fight - one last 'fuck you'. Go out on my feet taking some of them with me. Make the dying mean something. Like I'm not just letting you take it from me you motherfuckers – least ways not unless we go out together. Scrambled for whatever footing there was in the sand, aware of something grating in the bad knee, the vibration of joint ends against each other. Could hear a snap, but the body had gone beyond registering physical pain. Nerve endings get numb after prolonged beatings and torture. The noise just interfered with the balance.

Could vaguely see shapes of lifeless bodies in the pit behind us and knew this was one of the killing grounds. Convenient mass disposal. Tried to look around to see if there was any cover at all, any way to get away or hide. To disappear on my own terms. Pushed backwards against the throng of frightened men, looking for anything.

Anything.

Think this is probably the moment where the world broke into a thousand pieces, when that personal instant of complete psychological destruction occurred. All that 'special questioning' didn't do it, all that time bent over didn't do it, but this sure as fuck did. The final realization of being caught up in this insane inevitability – of being strapped down to a runaway train gone completely off the tracks.

Because it wasn't the thought of dying, but rather the way of dying that finally did it.

The mind was starting to scramble. This is it? This is how it all goes down? Hanging on day after day rewarded with a bullet to the head. Just one more body rolled into a mass grave with a hundred other anonymities. Folded into oblivion. The only official remnant of your existence a classified file locked away in a vault. No explanation given to the one person who cared about you more than anyone. Just a late-night knock at the door and a statement that you wouldn't be coming home this time. Just an apology. A flag handed over with a thank you. And later, much later - a star on a wall to visit.

No one would ever know how your soul burned with the belief that what you did in life had made a difference - not only to you but also to those you had helped. That you weren't just one more footprint in the sand, swept away beneath the wash of the tide. That this life had meant something to you after all and you weren't ready to give it up right then. Because at that moment of true finality you realized you were about to leave with an unsaid - 'I love you' – still on your breath.

Then it started. Bap-bap-bap.

And that was the end of all thought until I felt the touch of a hand. Someone was gently trying to turn me over. Couldn't see anything, but the touch was feathery light and in such unbelievable contrast to the violence that had been on me. Thought for sure I had to be dead and this was just the remnants of me coming round, senseless in the arms of some angel.

-----oOo-----

Turned out I wasn't dead after all, even though I felt like it and later wished for it. Turned out too that she was an angel, but of the earthly kind.

She had been a doctor. Until her family, once privileged, well-educated teachers, philosophers, and leaders in social awareness, had come under the scrutiny of the regime. Voices of dissent questioning 'leadership and morality', her father, her three uncles and her two other brothers had all disappeared into the 'house of questioning'. None had returned. No one ever questioned the regime more than once. All she had left was her younger brother, Azraq, until one day the Guard took him away too. That had been several months before, but she still held onto hope that she would find him, that she would find them all.

She had arrived at the killing ground earlier that night. She'd heard about the latest round of prisoner disposal. Everyone knew about these things almost as soon as they happened. And she knew where the killing ground was. Everyone knew that too. So every time word came of a killing, she went there to look for her family.

She'd examine every body, turning each one over to look at the face thoroughly, maybe with more of a clinical eye because of her training. Many were mangled so badly she couldn't see what they had looked like. This time she thought she'd found her brother. She recognized a piece of familiar clothing - a shirtsleeve with a hand that was missing two fingers. Her brother had lost his two in a boyhood accident at their uncle's farm. But the missing fingers on the hand weren't the same two as his. So she kept looking, widened her search - sifting meticulously through the bits and pieces of the already dead. And because she did, she found me some distance from the others, lying at the edge of the pit, miraculously still alive. She said she thought I was dead too, shot in the head like the others, until she turned me over and my eyes opened.

Later she told me that I wasn't the first one she'd saved. It was what she did now. It was her protest against the inhumanity of the regime – her personal quest to save the fathers, the uncles and the brothers who defiantly wouldn't die.

That night she came with Mister Alwar. He was a neighbor whose child she'd saved when she was still able to be a doctor. She needed a male escort because a woman was not allowed out unaccompanied - to do so was to risk being branded a '_sharmouta_'-- a whore -- and whipped or worse.

Going out there like that could have gotten them both killed. But they went anyway. He would stay in the truck, crying, unable to look at all the bodies. He kept lookout through his tears while she did the searching.

Tonight I was 'the brother'.

This is what she told him every time she found someone still breathing Mister Alwar knew this. He knew the role he played. Reluctantly he got out of the truck, skirting the corpses, more afraid of them than of being caught. They gathered up what was left of me and took me to her apartment.

--o--

She hid me for almost ten days.

The bullet had plowed along the side of my head, taking a good furrow of scalp, and kept going. Left me with one helluva headache, some brain fuzziness and blurred vision, but plainly very much alive. Somehow she got ice, God knows how and wrapped my hands until the swelling started to go down. Later she cut the wire, which was nearly buried in the swollen flesh. She used a scalpel, one of the tools of her trade, sawing meticulously at it for hours. She couldn't do much about the leg, but constructed a makeshift splint that wasn't half bad and kept the knee immobilized. She couldn't do anything for my jaw or mouth except let me suck ice chips.

After a couple days either I started making sense or she began to understand what I was mumbling. She contacted a neutral NGO, and eventually word got back via a friendly embassy to the State Department and then forwarded to SOCOM. All this must have been unbelievably risky for her. But once again she'd called in some favors from people she'd helped. And as it turned out, she'd helped many.

It seems angels have to be shared, so I guess I couldn't claim her as just mine.

First recollection of her voice is her saying _'inta fahamt_?' - 'do you understand?' - over and over. First couple of days, the answer was some variation of 'hell, no'. She'd hold up two fingers with a hopeful look on her face and I'd say '_ar'baa_' - four. Could tell I'd disappointed her but at the time couldn't think how.

Things started to clear on the third day and kept getting better; gradually understood what she'd done, why against all odds I was still alive. Understood eventually I was supposed to be her brother. Couldn't really tell her how much this meant to me - the extent of the gratitude -- jaw fractured, teeth broken, mouth swollen, still had headaches. Could only mumble and slur '_shukran_' - 'thank you' -- every time she did something for me, which was pretty much all the time.

She'd boil rice on a little gas burner, almost to mush, then mash it even more, mix it with some milk powder, let it cool, and spoon it carefully into my mouth. Eating was just fucking painful. Whole mouth was tore up inside, felt like. All she had was aspirin and some ampicillin, and that mush.

_'Sukhthange!_' she'd urge, 'eat up!'

I tried, for her, because clearly it meant something to her. As a doctor, she had almost no instruments or supplies any more but the urge to heal was still in her, a fundamental part of who she was, and nothing, not even her forced situation could steal that away from her. If all she had was starchy mush, then that's what she was going to use. All I could offer her as her patient was a good try.

In between the exhaustion of being cleaned or bandages being changed or trying to eat, I just lay there, half-awake. Hard to actually sleep. This worked out ok though, because she was desperate for someone to talk to. Her English was accented with British, but she'd pepper it every so often with Arabic, like she wanted me to learn more. As though it was important to her that I remember who she was and where we were.

Over the ten days in her apartment, it was just us in those two tiny rooms with the windows painted over. She'd sit there holding my hand, talking, and if I woke up, I'd let her know I was listening at least. It didn't seem to matter to her who I really was. She knew I was American but not why I was there, or how I'd come to be there. Couldn't really tell her about the mission. Couldn't talk anyway. Besides, it was better that she didn't know that part of it. Although I did tell her my name and she pronounced Jack with a French slant – _Jacque_. She couldn't get the O'Neill part right though – it came out sounding like '_AwNil'_. But I reckoned that was the safest. The less she knew the safer it would be for her.

She talked about how humiliating and frustrating her life now was. The family name had been marked by the regime so she had to be careful not to be seen. She wore the _jilbab_ – the long outer garments - whenever she went out. 'Hide like an animal', she said. She had to wear special shoes because a woman could be beaten if her shoes made noise. She still had a Prada handbag though, hidden away. '_Ghali!_' she said, smiling - 'expensive!'. She used to be very fashionable before the family were singled out for questioning and hiding was the only way to survive.

Now everything was _haram_ – forbidden. Before her life changed, she'd gone to several medical conferences outside the country, traveled frequently to Pakistan and Iran, even vacationed by the Black Sea. She used to have a satellite for television, and her old house – now taken away from her - had had a courtyard with a fountain and air conditioning and a live-in cook and maid. Now she was living in two rooms in a concrete warren of cheap housing, barely able to get by. The three windows were painted over so that she couldn't see out. It was perpetual twilight in her prison.

All her books were gone.

She was, she said with a strange laugh, one of the lucky ones. Even though she hadn't been married, and had no male relatives left, she had Mister Alwar – the driver - who acted as her guardian, accompanying her when she went out, taking payment for her medical services when she helped others. In return, she gave him and his family care, and cleaned their house. Word spread quietly, and others came to her for help too. Then one night she took her first step on the killing grounds and stumbled across the leftovers of those who had refused to die. She had saved eight since then. Hiding them until she could heal them, helping them to escape by whatever means she had available. Each had become a surrogate for family she had not found. By saving just one, she beleived she could somehow save them all.

She risked so much.

Knew this, because there was always this edge to being there, that someone would bust in the door and find me there and we'd both be dead. To have nearly died once and realized you might live made the possibility of dying again so soon unbearable. Wasn't emotionally in good shape. It's probably just as well speech was difficult and that she wanted to do all the talking. It took all the burden off me to do anything more than just lay there and listen, let her words tumble around me like raindrops or soft breezes. But always underneath there was this sense of how much she'd risked. Eventually began to listen harder, to work at listening. Got the idea that maybe she was owed more, that maybe remembering what she was saying and repeating it to someone else outside was the only payment that might mean something to her.

Eventually, the NGO relayed back to her, and she agreed to arrange transportation to a point about 30 miles away. I wasn't a part of any of this. She did it all on her own. And thank God - whoever was on Coms that night trusted the message they got. They stuck their neck out and took a chance that what the NGO passed on at face value was true and not a trap. Because going in over hostile territory was such an uncertain S&R, they gave the squad the opportunity to choose to go or not go. Later, Ferretti said that once they found out it was my ass so many guys were ready to pile into the bird they had to have a lottery. He's such a bullshitter.

Then one day she came in and said that men were going to take me away. At first I couldn't figure out what she meant. She was smiling though. So finally, I reckoned she meant a rescue. Couldn't tell her 'thank you' using the same words as 'thank you for dinner' or 'thank you for the clean clothes.' She'd always just reply, _malish_ - don't worry about it, it's nothing.

'_Malish'_.

But it **_was_** something. All of it. Everything she did.

--o--

The night we were leaving, she got me up and dressed me. I was leaning against her a little - couldn't hang on to anything, not even the mattress. Hands were fucking useless, knee was screaming for a stretcher, gut was in heave mode. Balancing just outright sucked. But got the jaw to cooperate long enough to whisper – '_ushegeh-tam' _- out to her. 'I love you'.

She froze. Thought - oh shit, wrong thing to say. But she held my face in her hands for a moment, real softly, fingertips resting on my cheekbones light as butterflies. She didn't say anything in return, she just smiled one of those gentle smiles that she'd been using to heal with. So I guess it was alright to say it after all. That she somehow knew what I meant by it, that it wasn't said to her, but about her.

She said she'd borrowed a car, this time from another man who owed her. As little as she had, it was hard to believe anyone actually owed her anything. Later on, I wondered over this, that maybe she'd indebted herself even more to these men. She was going to do the driving herself this time. Her neighbors wanted no part of any excursions that far outside the city. I think I tried to talk her out of it. Leastways, I hope I did. In the end, we kind of staggered out in the night to the car, me trying not to lean on her too hard. I half-fell, half slid across the back seat and rolled down onto the floorboards. She covered me with blankets and boxes. Just remember the drive hurt like hell, squashed down there getting bounced around, and being terrified the whole time that we'd be stopped and there was nothing I could do to defend her. They'd shoot her for sure, maybe worse.

When the engine finally turned off and she said in the sharp quiet, '_hona_' – 'here' - it was such a relief, can't describe it. She helped me get out of the car and sit on the ground. I leaned back against a tire while she stood anxiously looking at where the sky was getting lighter. Watched her face, and when she turned to look at me, I pointed to the west. Wanted to say - 'they're coming from the west, babe, see', - but could only manage a hoarse '_honak'_ - 'that way'. She covered her mouth with her hand and I swear to God she giggled at her mistake. Of **_course_** rescuing angels would come from the west. Never the east.

When she heard the bird cutting through the air, she looked afraid; she kind of crouched down next to me, got tense like she couldn't decide whether to stay or go. Wanted to hold her hand, but the arms were still like dead weights. Then the bird popped into sight, hugging the ridge, just hove into view with startling gorgeous clarity, halogens garish in the dawn, looking as blackly aggressive as the raptor that gave it its name. It got bigger and bigger very fast -- they were tearing low hellbent for leather, could tell. I made out the silhouettes of the .50 caliber deuces hanging out, the door gunners, watching the ground racing past just a hundred feet below.

Then she suddenly leaned over, her mouth almost touching my face, and said, '_bis'salaama_' - 'go without fear', 'safe journey' - and left. Just like that. Wanted to shout to her. Just shout. But couldn't see where she'd gone to. Couldn't. Fucking jaw, fucking legs, fucking arms. Nothing worked.

Fifty yards away the teams fast-roped down, ten, maybe twelve, not even waiting for the bird to touch. They hit the ground running and fanned out crouching, scanning. Four ran at me while the bird touched down behind them.

Tried to ask them where she was - behind the car, hiding? Running away? Inside the car? But nobody was talking, they were moving fast, eyes everywhere – only one of them spoke to me. Fucking Ferretti, and all he said was, 'Jesus Christ,' when he got to me. Someone else said, 'going home, sir', but that was it. Ferretti and another guy got my arms over their shoulders; two ran front and back, weapons at ready. They hustled me to the bird through the rotorwash tearing up small rocks and clods of dirt, pelting everything within a hundred feet. The pain from being moved like that was terrific. Maybe they reckoned that was why I was agitated, trying to fight them. Truth was I wanted to turn around and see her, call to her.

Wanted her to come with, see. Should've got up the energy to tell her before, should've gotten the brain organized in time, but didn't. Goddammit. Reckon I will always regret that.

The fucking bird was making so much noise. It was a dust-off, which meant jumpoff/jumpin, don't ease off the rotors, bird just barely kisses the earth and you can feel it wanting to jump back into the sky again. No one could understand. Not even Ferretti. Started striking out at them, frustrated as hell, and got strapped down for the effort. Started banging my head up and down against the mat - Listen to me!! Goddammit! Listen to me! The woman!!. But they were too busy, hands smoothed on my forehead, held it down while someone started a line. Felt the needle go in, and knew it was over.

Sedated.

Couldn't fight it.

Lay there all fuzzed, head lolled to one side looking out. They'd left the doors open and the deuces were hanging out scanning and ready, everyone nervous as hell. Looked past them, thought I could see her disappearing as we sprang up. The bladewash tore at the '_hijab' - _her headscarf - just one more thing they'd forced her to wear, just another way to try and kill the specialness of her. A second later, the scarf flew through the air like a moth in a whirlwind and I could see her hair was suddenly set free, loose, long and genuinely red, blowing like a flag. Red.

She didn't look afraid. She didn't look left behind, or lost. She looked almost triumphant, like she'd put something over on those bastards, like she'd actually won for the first time in years. A woman like that could get shut in, could have everything taken away from her, but they couldn't steal what it was that made her amazing. Even squashed and held down, she was amazing.

Her name was _Heilmdaahr_. It means 'fierce woman' - yet she was so much more than just that.

-----oOo-----

_**For Humpty.**_


End file.
